Iron Man

As a young boy, John Elling delighted in watching welders work. His grandfather was a blasting technician in the mid-1900s and one of the subjects of a famous Depression-era photo of industrial workers lining up for their paychecks. “Seeing these guys up on the scaffolding, I was intrigued by the bending of the metal and all the sparks,” he recalls.

Now, a half-century later, Elling draws on the skills of his grandfather’s generation to create functional art out of the oddest, ugliest bits of scrap metal he can find: aviation parts, drive chains, and excavator teeth, among a host of discarded items. Whether he’s crafting a larger-than-life metal scarecrow, a spiky, high-polish, glass-topped coffee table, or a many-mirrored garden gate, Elling’s designs always possess clean, architectural elegance and a defined wit, forming conversation pieces that blend easily into home or garden décor.

After moving to the Berkshires from Brooklyn in 1971, Elling took metal shop classes in high school, and later worked as a welder at Balgen Machine Company in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Over the years, he also paid the bills by woodworking and cabinet making, building architectural scale models, working as a millwright, and doing home carpentry and building. For a time, he and his wife, Brenda, now a marketing analyst at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, owned and managed a hardware store in Lee, Massachusetts.

In 1985, the couple purchased property on Route 41 in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Elling and his brother built the home where he and his wife live today. In 2003, after selling the store, they purchased some adjacent land and turned a burned-out cellar down the hill into a metal shop. A recycler at heart, the quirky and charming Elling has always been drawn to scrap and spends hours on end at scrap yards (especially Louis Perlman & Sons in Pittsfield, Massachusetts), antiques stores, tag sales, and country bottle dumps.

His shop is testament to this collector’s sensibility, and Elling, long and lanky, with salt-and-pepper hair and a sly smile that goes all the way up to the crinkled corners of his eyes, proudly shows off corroded fan blades, rust-clotted pulleys, chunks of twisted railroad track, disintegrating parts from age-rotted farm machinery, and warped old saws with sagging teeth. In this bunkerlike structure, among the welding and polishing equipment, rolling racks and carts of small parts, and shelves of neatly organized aviation scrap, chains, cables, papermaking grates, and unidentifiable whatchamacallits that seem wrenched from dungeon walls, Elling completes the bulk of his work. The quintessential night owl, he often stays here until two in the morning, mulling over designs and expertly combining parts.

Elling draws inspiration from disparate sources, including the precise lines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture and the visionary, anything-goes approach of musician Frank Zappa. He chooses pieces for their aesthetics rather than their utility, and usually winds up pairing eroded metals with sparkling, brand-new industrial pieces that have been discarded because of size irregularities. As Brenda puts it, “John has a real respect for metals and likes to give them a second life. He appreciates what the piece did in its mechanical life, but he can see something new and modern there that’s waiting to be expressed.”

Such interplay of dilapidated and pristine, old and contemporary, is on display throughout Elling’s work. An oversize, skeletal chair with a base made from the teeth of an excavator, a double-link drive-chain back, a wire-mesh seat, and rigid chain arms showcases both the sculptor’s appreciation for the raw strength of metals and his Tim Burton-esque sense of humor. A minimalist console table features a propane heater grate topped with a rectangle of glass and set on turned metal legs. For one client, Elling created a barbed wire, flush-mount ceiling fixture that recalls a bird’s or wasp’s nest. A spiky jet engine casing forms the base of a round, glass-topped coffee table with curved legs. Elling is in the process of creating a new line of café tables from jet engine parts and airplane landing gear, as well as more glass-topped console tables. He also fabricates railings and does a variety of metal repairs.

“This industrial stuff is going to be lost,” Elling says, surveying the bits and pieces strewn about his shop. “Kids now aren’t interested in working with their hands; they’re into computers. But I’ve always thought it’s good to be handy, to create something out of what seems like nothing.”

If Elling’s furniture is substantial without seeming heavy, and modern without appearing spare, his larger pieces—mainly outdoor sculpture—are more ethereal. Pearly Gates, which originally graced the entrance to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, is an elegant, arched, double-door gate composed of 118 stainless steel spheres woven onto stainless steel cable. It provokes observers to see themselves and their surroundings in an entirely new way as they are reflected repeatedly from slightly different angles. Weather Vane, which won Best in Show a couple of years back at the museum’s outdoor sculpture exhibit, is all bright, gleaming beauty, with directional beacons set atop a “crown” of jet engine parts and shiny chimes. That piece now resides with its new owner in Paris.

Pearly Gates has remained local, and was, until recently, on display in the garden café at Hotchkiss Mobiles in West Stockbridge. Owner Joel Hotchkiss first met Elling in the mid-1990s and has been a friend and admirer ever since, regularly exhibiting Elling’s outdoor sculpture in the garden and his smaller pieces, such as clocks, in the gallery itself.

“John’s one of the more interesting artists in the area,” Hotchkiss says. “He’s a very ingenious guy. He has a nose and an eye for these exotic, high-tech shapes, and also for more organic pieces. He’s able to cross-connect an amazing variety of metals, materials, and glass—and that’s not easy to do. He brings together all these diverse elements that really shouldn’t be together and somehow makes them look like they were meant to be.”

An example is the stunning Garden Temple: the piece is a treelike blend of recycled metal and highly polished stainless steel, in which the rust-covered trunk branches out into a delicate canopy of smooth, flat teardrops—all deliberately spaced so that when sun- or moonlight filters through its top, it casts a dazzling pattern of shadows against the ground. Metal Scarecrow (or “Rusty,” as Elling affectionately calls “him”), another Best in Show at the Rockwell in 2006, is a whimsical, friendly-faced tribute to the time-honored protector of crops—no easy feat for a lurching, nine-foot metal man made up of several different alloys.

In addition to repeat showings at the Rockwell, Elling’s work has been exhibited or sold at a variety of galleries, including Kingdom Fine Arts in Boston and Lotus Fine & Functional Art in Woodstock, New York, as well as at the Berkshire-based Naoussa Gallery & Ruth O. Cowell Sculpture Gardens (Tyringham), Hanback Gallery (Lenox), and Ferrin Gallery (Pittsfield). Several local organizations and businesses, such as West Stockbridge’s Williamsville Inn and the West Stockbridge Congregational Church, have also included Elling’s art in their interior or landscape décor. He’s a fixture—in every sense of the word—at area outdoor sculpture shows presented by Sculpture Now and Chesterwood in Stockbridge.

This summer, Elling’s Garden Temple is featured on the front lawn of the Berkshire Athenaeum for Pittsfield’s Artscape, a series of outdoor installations. Meanwhile, Pearly Gates is on loan to Kripalu throughout the year. Elling has teamed up with Group W, an art collaborative that encourages artistic and media experimentation, and that offers yearly “Night Shift” exhibitions that combine visual art with live music and food in a reclaimed steel fabrication plant (the home of East Coast Refinishing). He’ll also be working part-time for his original employer, Balgen Machine, which completes large-scale repairs and one-of-a-kind fabrication jobs, including engineering marvels such as the locks of the Erie Canal.

Elling chats enthusiastically about his return. “I was going to take a property management job, just for the supplemental income,” he explains. “But then I thought, ‘What am I doing? I want to be in my element.’ I’m so excited to be at Balgen again. It’s almost like a step back in time, to one of the last big metal shops in the country.”

Unsurprisingly, given his recycling proclivity, Elling is also working at making his property more sustainable. He regularly clears forest overgrowth from his land and uses the firewood to heat his home and shop. He grows vegetables in a series of raised beds, and keeps chickens and bees, even processing about one hundred and seventy pounds of honey for roadside stands each year. “It’s clean food; you know where it’s coming from,” he says. “It just makes good sense. We are rooted in this area, and we want to live closer to the land.” Elling is also looking into the possibility of installing solar technology and hopes to convert his outbuildings into studio space for other artists who have a similar desire to live simply in harmony with nature and experiment with their work.

“Art and life are connected,” Elling maintains. “The pieces that I use are found objects. They all have a history behind them. Working with reused materials also means I’m leaving less of a footprint on the earth. And it’s exciting—to find a piece of steel in an old dump or even lying around my backyard and then give it new life, that’s meaningful to me.” [SEPTEMBER 2009]

Robin Catalano is a contributing editor to Berkshire Living.

THE GOODS

John Elling Metal Work
271 Great Barrington Rd./Route 41
Williamsville, Mass.
413.274.1015
www.johnellingmetal.com

Chesterwood
4 Williamsville Rd.
Stockbridge, Mass. 
413.298.3579
www.chesterwood.org

Ferrin Gallery
437 North St.
Pittsfield, Mass.
413.442.1622
www.ferringallery.com

Group W/East Coast Refinishing
4 Industrial Dr.
Pittsfield, Mass.
413.442.6922
www.groupwnightshift.com

Hanback Gallery
93 Church St.
Lenox, Mass.
413.637.8886

Hotchkiss Mobiles & Gallery
8 Center St.
West Stockbridge, Mass.
413.232.0200
www.artmobiles.com

Naoussa Gallery & Ruth O. Cowell Sculpture Gardens
8 Main Rd.
Tyringham, Mass.
413.243.0456
www.naoussagallery.com

Norman Rockwell Museum
9 Glendale Rd./Route 183
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.4100
www.nrm.org

Photos, from top: John Elling in his studio; exterior of the studio; a table made from a jet engine; a table made from an old grate; Elling's wife Brenda with his sculpture Pearly Gates; Elling's Garden Temple; John Elling with Metal Scarecrow; Elling tends his beehives; a custom railing.